The Language of Law School: Learning to "Think like a Lawyer"

6
On Becoming a Legal Person:
Identity and the Social Context
of Legal Epistemology

In the previous chapter, we saw that a distinctive approach to reading written
legal texts is inculcated in law school classrooms. Reading like a lawyer turns out
to be an essential ingredient in the transformation to thinking like a lawyer. And,
of course, the way that professors determine whether students are learning to read
like lawyers throughout the semester is by assessing how they talk about legal texts.
In this chapter we move further into an analysis of the transformative process in
first-year law school classrooms, turning now to ask about the contours of the legal
personae revealed in talk about legal texts and about the spaces these people inhabit. In other words, what kind of people are revealed and created through legal
readings—not only the people in the texts, but also the speakers in the classrooms?
And what are the points of reference, the landscapes, within which they operate?
We will find that as students shift to thinking like lawyers, they at times speak from
an analytical distance, while at other times they actually stand in the shoes of new,
legal personae. As students and professors speak from these positions, we can discern the outlines of a distinctively legal drama, with its own characters and settings made real as they are discussed and enacted in law school settings. In this
chapter, we focus more carefully on metalinguistic features such as reported speech,
footing, framing, role-play, deixis, and pronomial usage to understand this process in detail.

Using this approach, I delineate a somewhat different, more complicated understanding of the law school process than is usually indicated by those who characterize it as learning to think like a lawyer.1 Although I will not constantly use quotation
marks to mark this particular framing of the concept "thinking like a lawyer," I would
ask that this more complex understanding of the phrase be assumed wherever it
appears in my text. First, this has long been an established catchphrase used by the

Notes for this page

Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.comPublication information:
Book title: The Language of Law School: Learning to "Think like a Lawyer".
Contributors: Elizabeth Mertz - Author.
Publisher: Oxford University Press.
Place of publication: New York.
Publication year: 2007.
Page number: 97.

This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may
not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.

If you are trying to select text to create highlights or citations, remember that you must now click or tap on the first word, and then click or tap on the last word.

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.